Essentially, the GridFilesystem is backed by 2 Infinispan caches - one for metadata (typically replicated) and one for the actual data (typically distributed). The former is replicated so that each node has metadata information locally and would not need to make RPC calls to list files, etc. The latter is distributed since this is where the bulk of storage space is used up, and a scalable mechanism is needed here. Files themselves are chunked and each chunk is stored as a cache entry, as a byte array.

Here is a quick code snippet demonstrating usage:

Copying stuff to the grid file system:

Reading stuff from the grid:

WebDAV demo

Infinispan 4.1.0 also ships with a demo WebDAV application that makes use of the grid file system APIs. This demo app is packaged as a WAR file which can be deployed in a servlet container, such as JBoss AS or Tomcat, and exposes the grid as a file system over WebDAV. This could then be mounted as a remote drive on your operating system.